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Author Topic: score based on history for individual searches  (Read 3315 times)

ohkine

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score based on history for individual searches
« on: February 20, 2010, 07:58 AM »
Hi, i'm reluctantly using Windows 7 on a new netbook i've got (coming from a Mac-only environment), and since i can't stand Launchy i'm trying to use FARR as my Quicksilver substitute. For the most part it's OK, but one of the things i can't figure out is how to get FARR to score items based on each individual search, not based on a global history.

As an example, on my Mac i've got Quicksilver set up to return results the following way:

  • searching for the text dr returns as the first result the Dropbox FOLDER (~/Dropbox)
  • searching for the text drop returns as the first result the Dropbox APPLICATION (/Applications/Dropbox.app)

I can not get FARR to do this. Instead, FARR weights each result as if it exists in a vacuum -- so, for example, if i've launched the Dropbox folder 6 times and the Dropbox application 5 times, then the Dropbox folder will be returned for both dr and drop.

Is there any way i can change this (without adding 'key words' or any other extra text)?


On a related note -- another thing that comes along with Quicksilver's per-search history is that in QS you can right-click an item in the results list and choose 'make this default for <current search text>'. This way you can quickly and easily set any arbitrary result to be the top match for a specific search (the FARR equivalent might be adding +9999 score or something). Can this be done too without manually adding every single result i want (and deleting them later if i change my mind) in the 'pattern scoring' options?

mouser

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Re: score based on history for individual searches
« Reply #1 on: February 20, 2010, 08:09 AM »
this is an interesting request; i know it's been touched on in the past but you've explained it quite well.

i guess the first answer is that you can't currently do exactly this in farr, though you can get pretty close by using FARR aliases.  it might pay to tweak the aliases a bit to make it almost exactly what you are asking for, but let me explain how you would do it first in farr.

in farr, you would do this using ALIASES (not search score patterns).

as an example you say:
in QS you can right-click an item in the results list and choose 'make this default for <current search text>'.

in farr, you would right click, and say "add this to alias group" -> New group.
then you would use the search text you want as the alias group name.

just creating this alias will normally do everything you want, give it a higher score as long as what you are typing matches an alias -- and the closer to the alias name the higher the score.

it would be fairly easy to automatically keep a list of [search terms , item launched] pairs, and boost those scores in the future, and let users manually tweak those pairs, which i think would do what you are asking -- i suppose it's easy enough to do that it's worth doing.  i guess this could even be added to the launch history and just give a generic bonus to previously launched files, and then an extra boost if the search term exactly meets what you searched for before.

on the other hand, i guess you could say the current farr philosophy would be that if you use the same search to find a file over and over again, you might consider creating an explicit alias for it using the method i described above -- so in your case you would create 2 aliases, one fro "dr" and one for "drop".

ohkine

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Re: score based on history for individual searches
« Reply #2 on: February 20, 2010, 08:32 AM »
Thanks for the quick response. That is certainly a lot more work than what you'd do in Quicksilver (especially if you need to do this for a lot of searches; also, if you change your mind later you are required to go into options and edit the alias manually each time, which requires a lot more effort from the user than if the application just maintained a list of default search->result pairs that can be over-written automatically with two mouse clicks)... but since FARR is my only good option i will just do that for now. :) cheers